On September 9, the U.S. government will end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for an estimated 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants, most of whom have lived and worked in the United States for decades. Roughly 150,000 of their children are U.S. citizens, and could see a parent's legal status disappear overnight.

TPS recipients like Alma Sandoval, a plant supervisor in Marshall, Missouri, arrived in the U.S. as a child fleeing violence in El Salvador. Now in her 30s, Sandoval owns a home, pays taxes, and supervises workers at a Cargill meat processing plant, the same plant where her late mother worked for years. "I am afraid of losing a life that took decades to build, not because I refused to follow the law or failed to work hard enough, but because there is no amount of hard work I can perform that changes the legal category into which I was placed as a child," Sandoval wrote in an unsent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Ending TPS won't just upend individual lives. In rural towns like Marshall, immigrant workers fill jobs in meatpacking, agriculture, and food service that keep local economies running. Losing this workforce means fewer workers on the line, higher costs for employers, and rising prices for consumers, on top of separating families who have called the U.S. home for a generation.

Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador has been renewed for 35 years, through multiple administrations, because the need never disappeared. Ending it now doesn't make anyone safer. It punishes people for building stable, law-abiding lives in the only country many of their children have ever known.

Sign the petition to extend Temporary Protected Status for Salvadoran immigrants, before families are torn apart and communities lose the workers they depend on.